The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness
- Author Kyung-sook Shin
- Narrator Emily Woo Zeller
- Publisher Blackstone Publishing
- Publish Date 15 September 2015
- Run Time 13 hours
- Format Audio
- Genre Fiction: general and literary, Narrative theme: Coming of age.
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What to expect
The highly anticipated release of the most personal novel by Kyung-sook Shin, who first burst onto the literary scene with the New York Times bestseller Please Look after Mom
Homesick and alone, a teenage girl has just arrived in Seoul to work in a factory. Her family, still in the countryside, is too impoverished to keep sending her to school, so she works long, sunless days on a stereo assembly line, struggling through night school every evening in order to achieve her dream of becoming a writer.
Korea’s brightest literary star sets this complex and nuanced coming-of-age story against the backdrop of Korea’s industrial sweatshops of the 1970s and takes on the extreme exploitation, oppression, and urbanization that helped catapult Korea’s economy out of the ashes of war. But it was girls like Shin’s heroine who formed the bottom of Seoul’s rapidly changing social hierarchy, forgotten and ignored.
Richly autobiographical, The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness lays bare the conflict and confusion Shin faces as she confronts her past and the sweeping social change of the past half-century. Cited in Korea as one of the most important literary novels of the decade, this novel cements Shin’s legacy as one of the most insightful and exciting writers of her generation.
Critics Review
“A moving portrayal of the surprising nature, sudden sacrifices, and secret reveries of motherhood.”
“The most moving and accomplished, and often startling, novel in translation I’ve read in many seasons. Every sentence is saturated in detail.”
“Intimate and hauntingly spare. A raw tribute.”
“The novel’s language, so formal in its simplicity, bestows a grace and solemnity.”
“Shin’s work often inhabits the space between story and reality…It’s no wonder that…The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness has the tenor of a ghost story.”
“Isolation and suicide among young adults worldwide have only tragically multiplied, making The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness urgently auspicious…This book is essential reading.”
“Not only vividly evokes the political unrest and fraught city life in 1970s Seoul but also deftly explores the struggles of a writer attempting to come to terms with her past through her work.”
“There’s a hypnotic quality to this melancholy coming-of-age story…It melds Shin’s characteristic themes of politics, literature, and painful experience into a mysteriously compelling whole.”
“Narrator Emily Woo Zeller establishes a mournful tone for an unusual coming-of-age story…Zeller embodies the somber mood of this period in Korean history through her precise pace and low pitch.”
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